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Friday, 19 December 2014

A large group of indie authors gathered to hear UK writer and entrepreneur Joanna Penn speak at the Auckland Central Library this week. The event started out as Joanna emailing a few writers to see if we'd like to meet for a coffee when she visited Auckland, but the burgeoning writerly grapevine sprang into such vigorous life that over a hundred replied! The result was a two-hour talk and Q&A session sponsored by Booktrack that brought together a whole heap of local authors who hadn't met before.

You can see the content of the talk here on Joanna's website, and you can find out about Booktrack here. It's a site that allows you to add background music and subtle sound effects to deepen the reader's immersion in your ebook.

But perhaps the most useful outcome was finding another place where local writers can meet up to share advice and information in this fast-changing business of ours, by joining the New Zealand Indie Authors Facebook Page: (Note that you will need to ask to join the
group)

I see this as a huge step forward in gaining the notice of book sellers and libraries. United we stand and all that! And the author community is full of such amazing and talented people that great things will come from letting them interact.

I'm excited to see what 2015 will bring!

Wishing everyone a safe and happy Christmas and (dare I ask) a prosperous New Year!

Friday, 12 December 2014

Most of you will know that I self
published my first novel ‘Cissy’ in the middle of the year. Maybe with your
first book you indulged in the same feelings I did: an incredible, overwhelming
feeling of awe and wonder at your own magnificence as you stroked for the first
time that glossily covered, exquisitely designed and presented work of art. Cissy’s
arrival meant the world will never be the same again.

Do you remember how slow
and painful the passage was for this delicate embryo of the heart and mind? For
me and Cissy the journey posed challenges of the most personal nature. As she
grew, I dithered, beset with doubt; should I express what we wanted to say so
bluntly, expose my feelings and be vulnerable to ridicule or rejection? The
potential to be misunderstood was enormous.If I was more restrained, would the immediacy and honesty be lost, would
readers have any awareness of the complex dynamics in play which created
Cissy’s environment?

Along the way Cissy,
encased in the cloth of golden prose I had created for her, was sent out into
the world to be edited. It was a cold, harsh experience. The first editor
didn’t like the book, said it was far too explicit. Demoralised, feeling small
and that Cissy was tarnished, I revised many of the passages so that they were
less likely to offend the sensibilities of her potential readership. In the
process Cissy became a tame and inhibited version of the real thing, lacking
frankness and vitality.

A couple of beta-readers
gave Cissy and me a shot in the arm, kind and encouraging in their acceptance
of her for what she was, a beginner feeling her way in the world, but with good
bones. I felt stronger as I sent her out to meet her second editor, the cloth
of golden possibility restored from around her ankles to drape gracefully
across her shoulders.Although the
second editor liked her well enough she thought Cissy lacked detail.The subtle references to passionate
interludes and flaming exchanges were not explicit enough, she wanted specifics.
In short, her opinion was completely the reverse of the first editor.

And so I learned a
valuable lesson:ultimately I must hold
onto my ownvoice, I must send my
darlings out into the world wrapped in the best cloth of gold I can give them,
and editors’ opinions are just that, they are not the word of God.

And then that magical
moment, when the first beautiful books arrived on my doorstep at seven o’clock
in the morning. The tea and toast went cold as I mooned over those gleaming
manifestations of the most creative achievement of my life. Maybe you more
experienced writers with numerous titles sustaining your sense of well being no
longer feel as I did then, but I admit freely, the satisfaction I feel whenever
I look at a copy of Cissy is as rich as it was that first winter morning.

It was not enough. Cissy
had not been presented to the world, was not Known. I felt bereft; as if one of
my precious children, created with so much of my own life force, deserving of
acknowledgement, was being ignored. Circumstances precluded having a launch at
the time the first books arrived and as time went by it seemed that Cissy might
miss out. But – last week I passed through the last rite of passage for a new
book – the Launch. Once again others expressed their opinion, pointing out
launches are a waste of money and sales don’t compensate for the outlay. They
didn’t understand, did they? A launch is not a money making venture. This was a
celebration of the transition of this work of art from being a dream in my mind
to being a tangible entity ready to go out into the world and create a life of
its own.

I see this book as being
rich with promise, blessed with the love and good wishes of all those who
attended the launch, as a baby is by those who attend a christening. Finally,
unequivocally, it is real.

Friday, 5 December 2014

Organization:
Make Your Annual
Plan Now

Nothing is more
important to your writing businessthan making an annual plan.

Even if you
don’t follow it completely. (You won’t.)

Even if your
year takes a drastic left turn. (It will.)

Even if you
bite off way more than you can chew. (You greedy dog, you.)

Those pesky motivational
geeks constantly tell us that “if you don’t have a target, you’ll never hit
it.” It’s a platitude, but they’re right, curse them.

It may take you
five years to do all the stuff you foolishly cram into your annual plan. That
can be frustrating, but so what? Life is full of frustrations, and then you
die. Being frustrated is better than dying, so don’t sweat the frustrations.

First Things First

There’s one thing you
should do before you make that annual plan for next year. Haul out the one you
made last year (if you made it), and look at it. Read the whole thing.

What went right for
you this past year? Was that part of the plan, or was it one of those serendipity
things that fell into your path?

What went wrong? Was
that something you could have predicted, or did it just come out of left field?

Did you achieve
everything in last year’s plan? If so, then bravo. If not, then you may have
aimed too high. That’s not so tragic. Aiming high is a good thing.

Did you make a
reasonable effort to execute your plan? How many hours did you actually put in?
(If you don’t know, then now would be a good time to set up some kind of tool
to track your hours. A lot of writers use a spreadsheet, and that works pretty
well. I use an online tool at HarvestApp.com that
makes it easy to track my time and pay myself an hourly wage for every
different kind of task. This costs me $9/month, but I think it’s well worth
it.)

Looking back at 2014, I see
that I only accomplished a small fraction of the things in my plan. But they
were the right things. I edited and rereleased three books from my backlist and
wrote one new book. As a direct result, my writing revenue for 2014 shot up
rather drastically over 2013. I averaged about 90 hours per month on my writing
work, which was more than I averaged at my day job.

I’d rate the year a
success, even though I only completed 4 of the 14 items on my list. The
important thing is that I worked hard and felt happy working on the projects I
chose. It’s a bonus that my revenue took a leap upward.

One Thing to Remember

Bear in mind that
there are things you have control over and things you don’t.

You can’t control
whether some publisher somewhere decides to buy your work. (This is why indie
authors like being indie—they don’t have to depend on what a publishing
committee decides.)

You can’t control how
many people are going to buy your book.

You can’t control
sickness, family problems, and all the random stuff that happens to you.

You can control
(mostly) how many hours you put into your writing.

You can control what
projects you work on.

You can control what
sort of marketing plan you make and whether you execute it.

Now Make Your Plan For
Next Year

Let’s keep this simple and
shoot for the sure thing first. Write down the answers to the following
questions:

What’s the one fantastic thing you’d like to achieve next year that’s actually in
your control?

What sort of outcome do you expect from it? (That is, will it likely earn
you money and if so, what’s a reasonable amount to expect? It’s okay to
guess here.)

How
much time and money
will it reasonably cost you to achieve this goal?

Do
you actually have that much
time and money available in the year? If you have time and money left
over, then go ahead and repeat the above questions as many times as you
want, until you’ve run out of time or money to execute them all.

That’s your annual plan for
the year, in a nutshell. It won’t hurt to write it up in a document. It won’t
hurt to put your major goals on a sheet of paper and post them over your
computer, so you see them every day.

I did the above steps just
now and immediately saw that I was hoping to do far more than is humanly
possible next year. I can’t do ten major projects next year. I can do
two.

I also realized that
my #2 project has a predicted return on investment that’s massively higher than
the ROI for my #1 project.

So I’m rethinking things
to move the bigger revenue-generator closer to the beginning of the year. Money
is time. The more money you earn, the more time you free up to do what you love
doing most.

In 2015, track
your progress and review it monthly. Are you putting in as much time as you
thought you would? Are things taking longer than expected?

If you do your
annual plan now, well before the New Year begins, you can hit the ground
running on January 1. And have a great year.

This
article is reprinted by permission of the author. You can read the full piece here.

Award-winning
novelist Randy Ingermanson, "the Snowflake Guy," publishes the free
monthly Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine, with more than 10,000 readers. If you
want to learn the craft and marketing of fiction, AND make your writing more
valuable to editors, AND have FUN doing it, visit www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com.